Más allá del pico del petróleo: el futuro de la energía"

Some years ago the UNED center in Barbastro decided to allocate a portion of its never very abundant resources to organize a conference, then called 1st International Conference "Peak Oil: Fact or Fiction?", dedicated to the study and analysis of the possibility and consequences of a persistent deficit of liquid fuels.

 

The existence of financial resources, unlimited in practice and increasingly detached from the natural capital that should theoretically represent, still allows fantasy dreams of producing energy at prohibitive energetic costs but bearable from the monetary point of view. So the extraction, at any price, of intermediate stages of the biomass transformation into something resembling oil has produced a turning point in the Hubbert curve, especially in the United States. In some circles this is considered a full-fledged refutation of the theories held by the so called peakoilers who are now accused, with apparent basis, of doomsayers and apocalyptic.

 

However if we ignore the economic interests of the oil companies, the widespread interest in maintaining BAU and the potentially catastrophic ignorance of these issues by population and particularly its leaders what appears is an almost desperate attempt to access, through procedures of undoubted technical merit such as fracking, the last convertible natural resources into liquid fuels. It is possible that these procedures have given us some extra time to make a more bearable transition to a post carbon society. But it is also true that the cheap and abundant energy is what has enabled the world's population to triple in just over fifty years and what will happen when is not available is something we can`t contemplate without apprehension.

 

It is clear that much of what can be said in events like the one we propose can be said, and in fact it is said in various internet forums, but it seems to us that an opportunity for a meeting in person of people concerned about these issues remains something of most interest, despite the discouragement which seems to spread in some circles, e.g., the Oil Drum was archived, ASPO meetings discontinued and the abandonment of some of the most representative members of the community. So we will try to meet again this coming October in Barbastro.